With 193 features to choose from, not to mention almost 100 non-fiction films, and 62 shorts, those in attendance at the 27th annual Vancouver International Film Festival are presented with such an overwhelming panoply of cinematic choices there is very little chance that anyone would be able to attend even a reasonably representative sampling of the film fare on offer.
Unless, you’ve got a hankering to attend one of the “series” (The Ark: Elements and Animals, Canadian Images, Dragons & Tigers, Documentaries or Spotlight on France), or wish to focus on films from one part of the world (Asian cinema, for instance), chances are you may miss “the best” of what Festival Director, Alan Franey, and his merry band of Festival programmers, have on offer for your international viewing pleasure.
So, VanRamblings has an idea: travel to New York City’s Film Festival, and you won’t even have to leave the comfort of a Vancouver cinema. After all, the New York City Film Festival is allegedly “heavily juried”, and their 28 selections are meant to represent the “best” of world cinema. One could do worse than catch the 15 films playing the New York Fest that are also on the schedule of the 27th annual Vancouver International Film Festival.
Attend The 46th Annual New York Film Festival … In Vancouver
New York City’s 17-day Festival – which kicked off this past Friday, September 26th – showcases 28 films by “emerging talents and first-rank international artists.” Fifteen of their featured “contemporary classics” are set to screen right here in our lush (if rain-drenched) west coast paradise.
24 City: Jia Zhangke’s 24 City, with its talking-head interviews and real-time images of work in a Chinese factory, a work of realism? A documentary? “A dispatch from a postindustrial, science-fiction future, the subject is the dizzying changes in the social and economic landscape of China,” says the NY Times’ lead critic, A.O. Scott. Wed, Oct 1st @ 12:30pm, Gran 7, Th 2.
After School: A follow-up to his Cannes Critics’ Week award winner, Unmei Ja Nai Hito (A Stranger of Mine), Kenji Uchida’s ingeniously constructed puzzled plotted script for After School feels “overstrained”, says Japan Times film critic, Mark Schilling. But, heck, with more than 400 selections from which to choose, After School made the NY cut. You decide. Screens Sun, Oct 5th 7:30pm, Gran 7 Th 2; & Tue, Oct 7th 4:30pm, Gran 7 Th 2.
Chouga: Darezhan Omirbaev’s flat reworking of Anna Karenina is strictly fest-related fare, says Variety magazine. Thu, Oct 2, 11 am, Gran 7 Th 4.
A Christmas Tale: A beautifully-cast, tragic-comic ensemble piece in which an extended family gathers for the title holiday, Arnaud Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale is an intricate, accomplished patchwork of sometimes nutty but always believable human behaviour, says Screen International’s Lisa Nesselson. Wed, Oct 1, 3:30pm, G7, Th7; Fri, Oct 3, 9:30pm, G7, Th7.
The Class: Laurent Cantet’s Cannes’ Palme d’Or award-winner. ‘Nuff said. Screens on Fri, Oct 10, 7pm, G7, Th7; and, Fri, Oct 10, 10pm, G7, Th7.
Four Nights With Anna: Variety magazine likes it, The Hollywood Reporter doesn’t. Thu, Oct 9, 6:40pm, G7, Th3; Fri, Oct 10, 11 am, G7, Th4.
Gomorrah: Set in the provinces around Naples, where the crime organization known as the Camorra is not parallel to the everyday workings of society but instead is the everyday workings of society, Gomorra’s a sweeping, stirring film that has the shoot-and-loot tension of the best crime cinema but also has the scope and serious intent of great drama, says Cinematical’s James Rocchi. Screens on Tuesday, Oct 7th, 9:30pm, at the G7, Th7; and again on Wednesday, Oct 8th, 4pm, at the G7, Th7.
Happy-Go-Lucky: Reveals the British master of ensemble dysfunction at a rich, new creative place, where delight and gratitude are emotions to inspire, rather than to doubt, says the NY Festival programme guide. Netted Best Actress honours for Sally Hawkins at the Berlin Film Festival. Screens on Sat, Oct 4, 4pm, G7, Th7; and Wed, Oct 8, 7pm, G7, Th7.

Continue reading VIFF 2008: Bright Lights, Big City … In Search of Festival Fare →

The Secret Life of the Grain (Grade: A): Unsentimental, deeply moving and radiating a familial and sensuous charm throughout, Abdellatif Kechiche’s César award-winning emigré drama, The Secret Life of the Grain, emerged the third full day of the 27th annual Vancouver International Film Festival as one of the early favourites to garner Fest recognition this year, a superbly made, well-acted family drama that packs a powerful emotional punch, and one of the films that is easily recommended for all discerning audiences. Due to screen twice more – on Wednesday, October 1st at 8:30pm (Empire Granville 7, Theatre 4), and again on Saturday, October 4th, at 2:30pm (Empire Granville 7, Theatre 3) – this is one film you won’t want to miss.
The story of 61-year-old Slimane Beiji (Habib Boufares), a recently laid off shipyard worker and the divorced head of a passionately boisterous Franco-
Tunisian emigré family, although The Secret Life of the Grain centres on Slimane, in fact it is the many strong, vibrant women in the film – Slimane’s daughters and women in his extended family – that pull the viewer into the film (most particularly, Hafsia Herzi, whose potent performance as Slimane’s ‘adoptive’ daughter, provides the film with much of its verve and fulsome energy). The film’s remaining women are almost equally as enchanting.
Where the emigré men in the film possess a beaten down quality arising from a worklife that has robbed them of their dignity, most of the women in the film have not only found a way of coping in a sometimes unwelcoming French society, but thriving (not least, one imagines, arising from the sensous beauty each possesses). A leisurely, narrative-driven, intimate family drama, in the process of exploring the emigré experience, The Secret Life of the Grain emerges as moving Festival film fare. A 2008 must-see.

An unusual theme has developed at this year’s Vancouver Film Festival.
Where for many years the theme of the Festival might reasonably be interpreted as the “Cinema of Despair,” in 2008 the theme of despair has been supplanted by a theme of hope, perseverance through hard times, an acceptance of one’s life situation, and the construction of an identity that allows the individual to maintain one’s dignity, as well as a joie de vivre.
We first experienced this theme on Thursday, the opening day of the Festival, while catching a screening of Lights at the End of the Tunnel.
In the first film of the series, As I Lay Dying, a mother nurses her young son, tamping a wet cloth over his body to lower his temperature and ease her boy’s pain. In the second film of the series, Escape, a young boy grieves the loss of his mother, and the loneliness of a solitary farm life with his grandfather. And in the final film of the series, At the End of the Tunnel, an 18-year-old boy blind since age four prevails in the most difficult of circumstances to find love, despite a life of hardship and previous despair.
In each case in the films above, a zen-like acceptance of one’s life circumstance emerges, along with transcendence and hope for a better life, an engaged life of involvement in the building one’s own unique identity.
That same theme of hope and transcendence emerges in …
Sugar (Grade: B+): Writer-director Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck’s affecting follow-up to their 2006 Oscar nominee, Half Nelson, tracks the emergence of a young Dominican baseball phenom, Miguel “Sugar” Santos (Algenis Perez Soto, making his big screen début). Upon arriving in America and assigned to the Single-A Kansas City Chief’s farm team, initially at least, Sugar proves to be the pitcher all, including himself, would wish him to be. But as inevitably occurs, Sugar’s prospects take a turn for the worse, leaving open the question as to how he will proceed. In the end, Sugar embarks on an unusual and self-directed path that leads him to a sense of connection, fulfilment and happiness outside of professional baseball.
To a somewhat less salutary degree, a theme of hope emerges in …
Ballast (Grade: C+): Lance Hammer’s mumblecore, Bressonian début, set in the dead of winter in the grim, grey and impoverished Mississippi Delta is minimalist, European-style filmmaking. Although hope does emerge in the lives of the film’s 3 protagonists, it is not a hope based on understanding of one’s circumstance, but rather of hope for barest survival, with little prospect for happiness and transcendence. For VanRamblings, although the subject matter of the film was decidedly un-Hollywood, the indie nature of the film offers not enough for us to wholeheartedly recommend Ballast.

Work on the Downtown Eastside beckoned in the early part of the day, causing us to miss the three films we had scheduled in the morning and afternoon, but we did make it to the evening screenings we’d chosen …

Lights at the End of the Tunnel (Grade: A): A quartet of short films — two from Malaysia and two from Taiwan, the work of filmmakers Ho Yuhang (the touching, hallucinatory dreamscape, As I Lay Dying), Charlotte Lim (the lively, funny, melancholy, Escape), Ho Wi Ding (the mystery thriller road movie, Summer Afternoon), and Chang Rong-ji (the exquisitely poignant, genre-bending boy-meets-girl story, The End of the Tunnel, with an amazingly affecting, tour-de-force performance by newcomer Sandrine Pinna (Yong Zhang) — will surely emerge as two of our favourite hours within a darkened theatre this year. Playing again at 1:30 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 26th, at Pacific Cinémathèque, no matter what you do, catch this series, even if it means skipping work, or adjusting your life. A must-see!
Be Like Others (Grade: B+): Iranian-American filmmaker Tanaz Eshaghian turns her camera on Iran, and the story of three ‘maybe‘ transsexuals, and their journey to and from sex change operations that transform their lives. In a country where homosexuality is punishable by death, but where sex-
change operations are perfectly legal within an Iranian theocracy that all but forces these operations on gay men, Be Like Others takes the viewer inside a bustling, modern day Tehran, exposing the humanity and travails of a group of its citizens, while exposing the victimizing hypocrisy of the state.